Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution

by Katerina Clark

Release Date: March, 1998

Edition: Paperback

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Artists as the vanguards of revolution

Katerina Clark has written this study of the artistic and cultural history of St Petersburg from the pre-revolutionary era through the ascendency of Stalin. It's quite a rigoursly academic book, so much so that at times it's a bit stilted in that formal post-modern academic language popular among a certain generation of historians.

And that is unfortunate. Clark has done her homework well, her topic is an interesting one as is the theme she develops.

Unlike Volkov's "St Petersburg a Cultural History", Clark show's the artists and writers on Nevsky Prospect were excited about the prospects of revolution under Bolshevism. And, for a few short years, avante garde plays, paintings, music and writing blossomed promoting the Bolshevik cause. But under growing hand of Stalinism it gradually became a tool to assist in his own particular vision of socialism in one country.

Clark doesn't let the artists off the hook. Unlike many cold war historians of the Conquest/Pipes variety, she shows a social group, complicite and active in varying degrees in the formation of the one party state. The same state that under Stalin destroyed them.

This is difficult reading at times- hampered by the PoMo academic writing style- and is deeply thought out (it probably requires more than a passing interest in Russian history.) Very important for students and layspersons interested in an overlooked area the Soviet era.